Hi all, 1st post... and its a strange one. I have 3 different Win XP machines on 3 seperate networks with the same problem. HTTP doesnt work, the affected stations cannot browse any site over HTTP, they CAN browse sites over HTTPS/FTP and connect to VPN's/Terminal servers and telnet out to other ports - however there is only 1 affected PC at each site, all others are working fine. Have tried running IE with the -extoff switch and other browsers, Opera, Firefox all to no avail. There is no issue with DNS resolution (all ping external sites, tracert is fine etc etc). There has been no change with the firewalls or AV (all are controlled by central admin or group policy). I did get a packet sniffer on it just out of curiousity, when it comes to doing http sites the DNS request can be seen to go out and get answered but after that nothing is passed. Have tried reapplying SP3, but that hasnt made any difference. Even tried reinstalling JAVA, no joy .. maybe .net framework? Im a bit stumped to be honest, but am determined to resolve this without reloading. There has to be some common component 'beneath' the browsers that has broken/corrupted? ... I would usually point at windows update being the problem, but again there are at least 10 other PC's at each site that are fine. Oh yeah... scanned it with Malware bytes and did a virus scan etc .. all OK including the HIjack this logs ... Hope someone has an idea :) Thanks.

Okay, I have run into this issue before myself. Do you use IE7 on those machines? I found it to be an issue with that. If you do use IE7: then go to Tools/Option then click on the Connections tab. Under there, go to LAN settings. For most networks, there should not be any check boxes checked. If there is one checked, than means it is looking for a proxy server or different connection setting. I have run into the issue of one or more of those getting checked, and being stuck checked. You can try un-checking it, but it might not work. The same setting will get moved over to other browsers as well, which is why Firefox and Opera will not work. I had to uninstall IE7 and revert back to IE6 before the setting can be changed. Then all should work for you and you should be able to reinstall IE7 and have it work for you. Hope this helps! Justin Farrell

Then you should be able to telnet to port 80 if you think the browser is the problem. Might start with nslookup, tracert or pingpath. See any proxy settings in explorer. "Best Practices", Event viewer, host file, perfmon, antivirus, anti-spyware, Live CD's, backups, are in my top 10

FIXED :) Turned out it was an AVG update that had broken HTTP, strange it only affected 1 pc per site (??) ... but anyway, AVG have a fix. In case that some components are inactive or you are experiencing blocked internet connection after the last AVG 8.0 program update (8.0.196), please try to restart your computer. If the issue persists even after the restart, proceed as follows in order to resolve this issue: download the archive from the link below to your hard drive and extract it fixfiles.zip [ http://gappa2.grisoft.cz/support/fi... ] run the "fixfiles.exe" utility restart your computer http://msmvps.com/blogs/bradley/arc... Thanks for the help all :) ... and no it wouldnt allow telnet to port 80 :)